Saja al-Dulaimi

Saja al-Dulaimi (1988-) was the former wife of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State.

Biography
al-Dulaimi was born to a conservative Muslim upper-middle-class family in Iraq; her father Ibrahim Dulaimi would become an Islamic State or al-Nusra Front emir and be killed in the Syrian Civil War in September 2013; her sister Duaa al-Dulaimi carried out a suicide bombing against Kurds in Erbil; her brother faced execution for a series of bombings in southern Iraq. In 2008 she was married off to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi while he was a university lecturer, and she described him as a family man who was good with their children. However, she was not privy to the terrorist side of al-Baghdadi, and their union ended after just three months together, with al-Dulaimi running away after becoming pregnant. She remarried to a Palestinian man named Kamal Khalaf, a suspected member of the al-Nusra Front, and they traveled to other lands in the Levant to be far from Iraq. al-Dulaimi was arrested in November 2014 in Lebanon for carrying false papers, and she was arrested and interrogated, although her information was worthless. She was later exchanged for captured Lebanese Army soldiers held hostage by the al-Nusra Front, and she was later interviewed on the Lebanon-Syria border by CNN in 2016.